New chapter is live.
Settle in, take your time, and let’s see what waits in the dark 🖤 ✦ Whatever had first driven Benjen Stark to join the Night’s Watch, Aeg had to admit one thing: the man was a dedicated First Ranger.
A raven had brought word that the king was expected to reach the North in roughly three weeks.
The ride from Castle Black to Winterfell would take less than two.
Even so, Benjen remained at the Wall for several more days, arranging defenses and patrols before preparing to leave.
That delay proved fortunate.
It gave Will time to stagger back to the Wall and provide testimony that matched Aeg’s.
With two surviving witnesses instead of one, Benjen changed his mind and decided, at the last moment, to take Aeg with him to Winterfell to report to the Warden of the North.
Aeg was quietly grateful that not everyone chased comfort as shamelessly as he did.
If he had been First Ranger and his brother, the Lord of Winterfell, had summoned him home, he would have packed that same day and ridden south without a second thought.
Compared with the Wall, even Winterfell—cold and grim by southern standards—was practically paradise.
Some men possessed a sense of honor Aeg could barely understand.
He would not belittle Benjen merely because he could not share that devotion.
But Aeg had not been born here or raised here.
He had no brother ruling the North and no ties to this world or its kingdoms.
He was a conscript dragged into someone else’s war.
Threaten a man with the loss of a hand, force an oath from him, and then expect him to live and die by it?
No.
Aeg was an ordinary man, not a selfless hero.
No matter how noble the oath sounded, he refused to accept that fate as his own.
Even setting selfishness aside, he believed he could do more for this world with what he knew almost anywhere else than he could by being trapped at the Wall to fight the Others blade in hand.
Opportunities favored those ready to take them.
For this journey to Winterfell, Will, who had watched from a tree as Ser Waymar Royce died, should have been the stronger witness.
Benjen chose Aeg instead, partly because Will was in no condition to travel and partly, Aeg suspected, because the former poacher would struggle to present a clear case before a great lord.
Will was timid, spoke with a rough accent, and sometimes stammered.
Aeg, by contrast, could organize his thoughts and speak plainly.
He had also heard that Will had been badly shaken by the Others.
The man had become nervous, almost unsteady.
* * * He and Benjen set out in the afternoon.
To save time, they would follow the kingsroad through the wolfswood straight to Winterfell.
They would not pass by Last Hearth or visit Deepwood Motte, so they carried all the food and supplies they needed, just as they would on a ranging.
The only difference was that, for speed, each man brought two horses.
Fine snow drifted through a deep, muffled quiet as the two of them rode out through the gate of Castle Black.
The road beneath them was called the kingsroad.
It ran from Storm’s End through King’s Landing and Winterfell all the way to Castle Black, though this far north it had narrowed to little more than a rough forest track.
They rode south in silence and soon drew near Mole’s Town.
As they crested a gentle rise, Aeg could not help looking back.
Castle Black sat on the south side of the Wall, where the light was not blocked by the ice and the Wall’s pale color made it strangely easy to overlook from day to day.
For men of the Night’s Watch, ignoring the massive ice barrier beside them was not difficult.
After several months at Castle Black, partly to save his neck from constant strain and partly because familiarity dulled awe, Aeg had learned to stop looking up.
But the Wall did not vanish just because a man stopped looking at it.
It stood there, as if it had existed since the beginning of the world and would keep guarding the North until the end.
From a few miles away, its full shape finally revealed itself.
What had once filled the sky and overwhelmed his vision became a gray-blue rampart across the northern horizon.
It ran east and west without a break, stretching to the edge of sight before disappearing into distant white mist.
Only with distance could he understand its scale.
This was the largest structure mankind had ever built in this world, and almost certainly the tallest man-made thing in Westeros.
From here, the towers and huts of Castle Black looked like toys scattered at its foot, while the black-cloaked men moving among them were no more than ants.
In Aeg’s old world, the Wall would have been a wonder of wonders, the kind of place people took time off work to visit with someone they loved.
They would flee loud cities and fast lives, travel to the far north to feel the cold wind and touch the snow, climb to the top, gaze over the endless Haunted Forest, and talk earnestly about being cleansed by nature.
It would have been a story worth bragging about for years.
The Others changed that picture completely.
The Wall was not a scenic marvel.
It was a military fortification against extinction.
This was the front line of a war for survival, and few places in the world were more dangerous.
If nothing changed, this trip to Winterfell might be Aeg’s last chance to escape before he was sent north again.
If he could manage it, he hoped never to return to this place for the rest of his life.
* * * “Aeg.” Benjen Stark’s voice cut through his thoughts.
“You are a foreigner,” the First Ranger said.
“I know you resent being forced into service at the Wall for reasons that must seem strange to you.
But take this as friendly advice.
Do not think of running.
Countless men have already proven with their lives that desertion carries a heavy price.” ✦ ✦ ✦ Want to keep going?
I hope this chapter gave you another reason to stay with the story.
There’s still plenty ahead, and things are only starting to unfold.